Pavilion Projects

Jesse R. McKee

Part of Montreal’s artistic community for the past decade, Pavilion Projects is a complex entity mixing curatorial collective, artistic platform and cultural marketing firm. But where do they really stand?

My first encounter with Pavilion Projects was in the autumn of 2005. My roommate at the time was asked to lend a helping hand to his friend’s band during an event forming part of the annual Pop Montreal festival. Pavilion Projects had mounted a collaborative project between several contemporary artists and independent musicians, which took the shape of an open-air concert in the city’s brutalist park, Square Viger. In the tradition of a fête galante, I watched my roommate get costumed-up as part of the two-man, four-armed drummer backing the band Awesome’s session of heavy and epic art rock. All the while, the artist Will Munro shot off fireworks around the band in the midst of the square’s concrete slabs and still-water ponds.

Pavilion Projects, comprised of Maryse Larivière and Robin Simpson, could be easily described as a curatorial collective. However, its own self-determining language shifts from project to project. Artistic platform, cultural marketing firm, a bunch of bratty activists or well-read bons vivants, all these terms could be used to describe the group and frame its output. And it has been a nomadic, homeless and completely integral part of Montreal’s artistic community since 2004.

Institutional Critique

To understand Pavilion Projects’ impetus, the idea of collectivity needs a bit of unpacking from a Canadian perspective. If you were to walk through any of the high-walled museums and art institutions across the country, you’d wonder if Institutional Critique ever made it past the 49th parallel. The majority of major Canadian institutions remain cautious and traditional. Institutional Critique was outsourced to the artist-run centres for the most part. During the development of the Canada Council for the Arts in the 1960s, these centres were planned as utopian sites where artists could free themselves from the constraints of both museums and commercial galleries. In the beginning they were reasonably funded, and allowed for an incalculable number of new departures in many artists’ practices. But a side effect of this liberal planning was that exciting experimental and critical practices were confined to these governmentally legitimised, sideshow spaces: it was safe to make criticism, but it was also safe to ignore it. This cross-country network of artist-run centres now suffers from budget cut after budget cut, tumultuous and contested styles of governance, but ultimately it remains an active current in the dissemination of contemporary art.

With the museum remaining stagnant and the artist-run centre kept at arm’s length, the idea of collectivity becomes especially important in Canada. At the 2008 Trade Secrets conference at the Banff Centre, Barbara Fischer spoke of one of the country’s most notorious collectives, General Idea, active from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. Fisher described the collective’s practice as a Gesamtkunstwerk in which members alternately took on the roles of – among countless other things – artists, collectors, cultural conductors and publishers. She argued that the group’s true strength came from its ability to queer the notion of the museum and the art institution. This is not to say that important collectives, artist-run centres and major institutions have been mutually exclusive. What the notion of the collective offers, under these circumstances, is something more potent and responsive than what is already on offer.

Local enterprises

Pavilion Projects has been able to garner a tremendous amount of momentum by constantly repositioning the sites of its action, casting a wide net for its artists and other collaborators. Another crucial component of the group’s strategy has been to remain free of funding from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. These are two monetary lifelines that any cultural producer and institution usually relies upon, as the commercial markets and even private interest for contemporary art are slim to non-existent in Canada. Instead, the group has been pursuing small-scale collaborations with local enterprises with the aim of producing its projects. Typical of this approach has been a series of presentations for film and video works that doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel with experimental conceptual playfulness or curatorial finesse, but instead relies on the tried-and-true success of the dinner and a movie format. But not in the tradition of Gordon Matta Clark or even Rirkrit Tiravanija, where the food or its sharing is the art: in this case, the art is on the screen and the food is on your plate (and very well priced and good food at that). In collaboration with local restaurants, such as Dépaneur Le Pick-Up in Montreal’s Mile End neighborhood, Pavilion Projects has been screening moving image works over the past year to sold out houses, films by the likes of Heather and Ivan Morrison, Zin Taylor, Marina Roy, Catherine Vertige & Kosten Koper and Eve K. Tremblay.

Appetite for contemporary art

Pavilion Projects has become a first point of contact for many artists from outside Canada and even North America. This outward-looking nature for critical talent, coupled with a sense of quick receptiveness, has allowed the group to bring in, before any of the institutions, artists such as Ian Forsyth and Jane Pollard, Ulla von Brandenburg and Aurélien Froment. Equally, it has been engaged with a sense of localness, seen in the projects brought together under the umbrella title The Enterprise (2006-07). This series of events, actions and exhibitions saw Pavilion Projects take on the politics of the Montreal and Quebec art scene. The Enterprise has used local artists to perform action events, such as a black-masked one minute silence held at a forum hosted by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. It has conducted a citywide survey about the appetite for contemporary art in Montreal, which was a thinly veiled translation of a questionnaire on drug addiction. Respondents were asked to respond to statements like ‘My desire for art now seems overwhelming’ and ‘I would consider buying some art now.’ Most substantially, The Enterprise saw the transformation of the artist-run centre Articule into what appeared to be a hastily assembled political headquarters. Here Pavilion Projects hosted local meetings to assess the need for a new medium-sized contemporary art institution in the city, the idea an alternative to the proposed development of a casino in the old industrial site of Pointe-Saint-Charles.

More recently, Pavilion Projects has begun to author its own seasonal art maps for both Montreal and Toronto. It has also been organising an alternative strand of programming which runs parallel to the official programme of the Biennale Montreal – calling into question the utility and worth of the Biennale, which seems to be stumbling more and more each year. These proceedings, critically oriented yet never without a dose of humour, constantly beg the question of whether or not you should be taking them seriously. In this regard the group’s own political orientations ultimately remain elusive.

Running the risk of appearing apolitical, what comes out of Pavilion Projects’ approach is a focus on independence: an independence achieved through the group’s somewhat parasitic attempt to inhabit multiple modes of contemporary art dissemination all at once. And using instability to its advantage, in the tradition of ‘light luggage’ curating.1